- Soft goal
"In
ice hockey , a soft goal can also refer to a goal that is the result of a weak effort, or none at all, and should have been a routine save."The term soft goal is used in connection with
modeling language s and specially withgoal-oriented modeling . Soft goals can represent:
* Non-functional requirements
* Relations between non-functional requirements"Non-functional requirements" (or "quality attributes", "qualities", or more colloquially "-ilities") are global qualities of a software system, such as flexibility, maintainability, usability, and so forth. Such requirements are usually stated only informally; and they are often controversial (i.e. management wants a secure system but staff desires user-friendliness). They are also often difficult to validate.Why "soft"?
Normally a goal is a very strict and clear logical criterion. It is satisfied when all sub-goals are satisfied. But in non-functional requirements you often need more loosely defined criteria, like satisficeable or unsatisficeable. The term
satisficing was first coined by Herbert Simon. Soft goals are goals that do not have a clear-cut criterion for their satisfaction: they are satisficed when there is sufficient positive and little negative evidence for this claim, while they are unsatisficeable in the opposite case.Relations between soft goals
* Decompostions
** AND
** OR
* Contributions
** Helps (+)
** Hurts (-)
** Makes (++)
** Breaks (--)
** UnknownReferences
[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=293165 Mylopoulos John, Chung Lawrence, Yu Eric: "From Object-Oriented to Goal-Oriented Requirements Analysis"]
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